Andrew Cardinal bathing his forehead in a cold clear Wisconsinian stream. There were trout and brook lampreys.

If you scratch an environmental historian you’ll find a nature lover under the surface. Many of the ones I know—myself included—have an origins story that roots our occupational choice in an early appreciation for nature. I recognize that I am using “nature” here as an entirely unproblematic concept—something which few environmental historians would accept as we recognize nature as an historically flexible set of ideas. Yet even as I “problematize” nature in my work, I draw unproblematically on it as a deep source of pleasure and solace.

This struck me forcefully after returning from a canoe trip to Algonquin Park this past week. I woke the first morning back in Ottawa with a Zen smile hovering above the placid pool of my brain. Five years of not paddling and not portaging made the trip a challenge: I was clearly out of shape from doctoral study. After cresting a long slope on a long portage I dropped to the ground to rest; my heart was pounding so hard I was sure it was going to leap out of my chest.

Five minutes—or was it 15?—of blessed peace in the spring sun among blossoming trout lilies followed. That pause, and its companion moments during the trip contemplating clouds, butterflies, trees, birds, rocks, reptiles, water, mammals, moss, and fish, infused me with joy. Despite an aching back and sore hips, and Algonquin Park’s inescapable history, I was thankful. I recognized my privilege even as my historical consciousness lapsed into momentary silence.

There have been moments during these years of Masters and PhD study that the acids of inquiry have corroded my love of nature. But this has happened before and academic study wasn’t the cause: one summer as a commercial fisherman turned me away from the pleasures of sport-fishing for several seasons. Catching fish for a living made the recreational form seem trivial. And the waste and racism I witnessed were demoralizing.

But I returned to fishing and with a different perspective that has since directed my work. Being in nature and querying it are not mutually exclusive: we must in any case learn to live with our contradictions. Besides there is no pleasure like idleness—which Izaak Walton pleased to call ‘contemplation’—for it is the very soul of angling and the condition for thinking.

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About Will Knight

I am PhD candidate in Canadian environmental history at Carleton University in Ottawa. I am currently writing a dissertation on Canada's fisheries museum. Never heard of it? That's because it was demolished in 1918...My thesis explores this short-lived institution and the conceptual and material modeling of fish and fisheries in late 19th and early 20th century North America.

Will Knight

I am PhD candidate in Canadian history at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. I am currently writing a dissertation entitled “Modeling Canada’s Aquatic Nature: the Dominion Fisheries Museum and fisheries exhibits 1883-1955.” This project examines the conceptual and material modeling of fish and other marine animals in Ottawa’s fisheries museum. My primary fields of research are museums, fisheries, and natural history in North America in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Publications

“Samuel Wilmot, Fish Culture, and Recreational Fisheries in late 19th century Ontario.” Scientia Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, 30, 1 (2007) 75-90. Download the article in PDF from Erudit here.

Talks | Guest Posts

The Dominion Fisheries Museum in Ottawa: Lost and Found. This is a podcast of a talk I gave at the Ottawa Public Library, part of a four-lecture series entitled “Discovering Ottawa’s Environmental History.” This podcast was recorded by the Ottawa Public Library on February 16, 2011.

This is a blog post I contributed to Wise Monkeys, a Vancouver-based food blog, on the semiotics of tinned fish labels… The Landscapes of Canned Fish